Generation Z – There Is Hope!By Shlomo Maital Generation Y is the generation of those born between 1981 and 1995. They are also known as Millenials. They have been slandered as selfish, egoistic, live-for-the-present, and worse. Today they are between 23 and 37. Generation Z is the generation of those born 1996 and later. A New York Times column by Dan Levin, “Even young Republicans are drifting left on social issues”, Jan. 25/2019, reports on a Pew Research Center survey of American Gen Z, some 12,000 of them. Here are the main findings:• Only 30% approved of Trump’s performance. This is well below the average (Trump is deeply underwater in his approval ratings).• 70% said they wanted government to do more to solve the nation’s problems. [Levin says, those attitudes mirror those of Gen Y, which may mean that these two younger generations can powerfully combine to change the current bleak reality in the US]. • There are more than 68 million Americans who belong to GenZ. This is 22% of the American population. So more than one American in every five is GenZ. This makes this group politically decisive, in the long run. • 2/3 of GenZ believe blacks are treated less fairly than whites in the US.• GenZ believe government should play a more active role.

This is not good news for Republicans; GenZ is more progressive than older generations. But it is good news for those who seek a less conservative America.

Tuesday’s New York Times has an article, “How to make a movie out of anything”, by Alex French. In it he describes how Hollywood producers are desperately searching for IP, slang for intellectual property, as the basis for movie scripts. Translation: Find something people recognize easily, and build a plot around it.

I grew up in the 40s and 50s, in the era of radio. I listened to Boston Blackie and the Cisco Kid. I heard horses hooves, a pistol firing…and I had to imagine the horse, the revolver… everything.

Today? In the era of TV, MTV and virtual reality and smartphones – all the images are there, given to us…no need to imagine. A Lego movie? Lego is building blocks. How can you make a blockbuster Lego movie? Turns out that you can – if you start with something people are familiar with, they do not need to use their imaginations. But if you start with a conventional movie plot, a story, however strong, people need to imagine – and it looks like our young people no longer can. We need to have the images stored in our brains already, because…we’ve lost the ability to create them ourselves.

This sounds like a cranky old curmudgeon yearning for the good old days. Perhaps. But if this new Hollywood trend portends the death of imagination – then we’re in real trouble. Worse yet, nobody seems to care much.

Martin Seligman is one of America’s leading psychologists, and inventor of the ‘learned helplessness’ theory, which explains why we sink into despair and apathy. That theory, it turns out, is more than a little negative. So Seligman took the opposite tack, and helped invent positive psychology, which is about how to be efficacious optimistic and happy.

Seligman and a journalist, John Tierney, wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times magazine, excerpted in the global New York Times. In it they make an interesting point. Homo sapiens (wise human) is a misnomer, they say. Because – well, we humans are not that wise… Just look around the world at what we do to each other.

Instead, call us homo prospectus (future looking human). Because we, unlike animals, are able to imagine distant futures and things that do not yet exist. This makes us creative. When we make decisions, we weigh consequences, and in fractions of a second, envision future consequences of our decision and then choose or decide. Seligman and Tierney say that “the main purpose of emotions is to guide future behavior and moral judgment.” Why? You judge how you and others feel, when you ponder a behavior, and decide on that basis.

Moreover, they cite brain imaging research, showing that when we recall a past event, we combine 3 pieces of information from 3 different parts of the brain: what happened, when it happened and where it happened. Apparently, we use the same circuitry when we imagine a future event. Our hippocampus (a part of the brain) assembles these three pieces of prospective guessing, to create something new. And even when we are relaxing, our brain constantly works “to recombine information and imagine the future”.

My ‘take’ on this? We have become a myopic society, focused on present gratification and present consumption, and far less on saving and delay of gratification. Are we degrading “homo prospectus”? Are we degrading what truly makes us human, and in doing so, damaging our future and that of our children?

Having trouble understanding President Trump? Read thousands of words and columns, blasting Trump, but you still (like me) do not understand who IS this guy?

Read David Brooks (Op Ed, New York Times, May 15)…. He has figured it out. Trump has a syndrome. Dunning Kruger Cognitive Bias.

What is it? Here is the definition: *

Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error.

Meaning? Incompetent people think they are more competent than they are, precisely because…they are incompetent. Trump highly overestimates his abilities (“best speech ever to Congress on healthcare”, “how to fix America’s aircraft carriers”, etc.).

People with Dunning-Kruger, who lead nations, are very very dangerous. Not knowing is one thing. Not knowing you don’t know is quite another. And when you lead the world’s most powerful, wealthy nation? Disaster. Moreover, people around Trump cannot control him, and are fired abruptly when they oppose him, a corollary of Dunning-Kruger. Trump is at the summit of Mount Stupid (see diagram), and since January 20, has proven to be there with blunders almost daily.

What will happen? Let’s see if America’s constitution and political institutions are capable and resilient enough to deal with this disastrous cognitive bias.

* Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 77(6), Dec 1999, 1121-1134.

In his New York Times column today, Roger Cohen writes movingly about the carnage of war and battle. He also includes a passage that caught my eye:

It seems, as we grow older, that we are haunted less by what we have done than by what we failed to do, whether through lack of courage, or information, or insufficient readiness to cast caution to the winds. The impossible love abandoned, the gesture unmade, the heedless voyage untaken, the parting that should not have been – these chimera always beckon.

We are haunted less by what we have done than by what we failed to do.

I just turned 73. I admit that as a fairly ethical person, I am sometimes haunted by what I did. But also, as Cohen notes, I’m mainly haunted by what I did NOT do, by opportunities missed. Like, becoming an economist rather than a journalist or writer, because it seemed safer.

I think that if young people consulted me today, the main advice I would give them is to think ahead backward. When faced with a great new opportunity, a scary one, one that involves risk – how do you decide? Think ahead. Picture yourself a decade ahead, 2025. Imagine that you have taken this opportunity. Picture where you are, what it feels like. Feel the emotion in your gut. Does it feel right? Now, imagine yourself in 2025, and you’ve chosen NOT to take the opportunity, or chance. How does it feel? Do you sense regret? Is that sense of regret a sharp stabbing pain in your gut?

Do you agree with Roger Cohen, that we are pained by things we pass by and miss, rather than things we do and experience?

You cannot try EVERYthing. But you can try more things, and be more adventurous. Even if you fall on your face, you’ve learned, and grown, and always have the warm feeling that you had the courage to give it a shot, which for me is a big part of self-awareness and self-acceptance. And it’s never too late, even at age 73. Right?

Writing in the online magazine NewsMic, (Nov. 10), Tom McKay reports that “There’s fairly robust psychological evidence that messiness isn’t just symptomatic of poor standards or effort, but might actually provoke creativity. He quotes psychologist Kathleen Vohs, who wrote in the New York Times, “being around messiness would lead people away from convention, in favor of new directions.”

Here is the experiment she ran. To test this hypothesis, Vohs invited 188 adults to rooms that were either tidy or “messy, with papers and books strewn around haphazardly.” Each adult was then presented with one of two menus from a deli that served fruit smoothies, with half of the subjects seeing a menu with one item billed as “classic” and another billed as “new.” The results (published in Psychological Science), Vohs reports, were enlightening. As predicted, when the subjects were in the tidy room they chose the health boost more often — almost twice as often — when it had the “classic” label: that is, when it was associated with convention. Also as predicted, when the subjects were in the messy room, they chose the health boost more often — more than twice as often — when it was said to be “new”: that is, when it was associated with novelty. Thus, people greatly preferred convention in the tidy room and novelty in the messy room. A second experiment with 48 adults found that subjects in a messy environment came up with ideas “28% more creative” while creating a list of unconventional uses for ping pong balls, even though the two groups came up with the same number of ideas. Vohs argues the results are clear: Messiness actually spurs creativity.”

The point here is obvious. Creativity itself is MESSY, in caps. Creativity people have messy minds, that collect random pieces of information and find new ways to link them. Creative ideas emerge from disorder and entropy, not order. The ultimate state of order is the universe as it will be in a few hundred billion years: All the energy will have been burnt up, and the universe will be perfectly orderly, at a temperature of absolute zero.

So — messy desk? Enjoy it. Cherish it. And, nonetheless — do clean it up once in a while, if only for your significant other.